Another month and another web browser. This week, we have been introduced via a New York Times article to Rockmelt. Details are at the non-existent end of sketchy but we do know a little bit about who is behind it.

Back when the web was young, we all used the Netscape Navigator browser. Netscape which was founded by Marc Andreessen and it is he who is funding Rockmelt. There seems to be some hints that the browser could be linked in some way to Facebook but little more.

Do we really need another web browser? As a web developer the answer is a firm ‘no’. In common use we now have three versions of Internet Explorer, quite a few variants of Firefox, at least three versions of Safari, Chrome and if you are really counting, Opera.

All of these browsers have their strengths and weaknesses. Personally, I use Safari as it is fast but I also use Firefox because with extensions like Firebug and Selenium, it is great for web development. The big problem is all of these browsers are slightly different and these differences make producing websites harder to develop. Of course, we could all just pick the lowest common denominator and produce websites that work in IE6 only. In fairness, Chrome and Safari are reasonable similar as they are both based on WebKit. Also, most Firefox versions are close but there seems to be little similarity between Internet Explorer versions. We don’t know what Rockmelt is based on — it may be Gecko as per Firefox — but we know it will be subtly different.

What we all want is a fast web browser but that is something we don’t seem to have. Apart from tabbed browsing, it is really hard to think of a really useful new feature in a web browser for the last five years. I always wondered if I somehow managed to resurrect a copy of Netscape 1.1 would it be blindingly fast compared with any of the current browsers. Probably not and it would almost certainly be incapable of rendering any web site I pointed it at. Web browsers remain slower than we would all like. Some of this is down to the person who implements the site — there can be many ways of implementing a page in modern HTML/CSS, some of which are fast and some of which are slow. Again there are tools which help developers analyse this — Yslow and PageSpeed — but if the browers were faster we wouldn’t have to worry about such things.